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The Earth as a planet

Article  in  International Journal of Remote Sensing · September 2018

DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2018.1514813

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 International Journal of Remote Sensing

ISSN: 0143-1161 (Print) 1366-5901 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tres20

The Earth as a planet

Philippa J. Mason & Arthur P Cracknell

To cite this article: Philippa J. Mason & Arthur P Cracknell (2018) The Earth
as a planet, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 39:18, 5767-5769, DOI:
10.1080/01431161.2018.1514813

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Published online: 07 Sep 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING
2018, VOL. 39, NO. 18, 5767–5769
https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2018.1514813

EDITORIAL

The Earth as a planet

The Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society’s Annual Conference provides an

excellent opportunity for members to meet and present their work on any aspect of
remote sensing or photogrammetry. Each year, however, a special theme is chosen as a
focus for the conference and, for RSPSoc2017, the topic chosen was ‘The Earth as a
Planet’. RSPSoc2017 was held in the Royal School of Mines, Department of Earth Science
& Engineering, at Imperial College London from 5 to 8 September 2017.
The conference was well attended, with delegates travelling from 18 countries out-
side the UK. The Satellite Applications Catapult & UK Space Agency ran their annual
Space Placements in Industry (SPIN) Showcase on Wednesday 6th Sept, in parallel with
the main conference, and it was attended by students and corporate internship hosts. A
series of poster presentations and talks ran throughout the day, and the event finished
with a visit to the 3D visualisation suite at Imperial College London where ‘SPINterns’
were treated to a virtual field trip on the surface of Mars, led by Prof Sanjeev Gupta.
The talks in the main conference sessions were of a very high standard, and there were
two excellent keynote talks from Mike James (Lancaster University) on the state-of-the art
in structure-from-motion, and by Kathie Bowden, on the future direction of EO in the UK.
In addition to sessions on land cover, risk & hazards, operation and validation
(commercial issues), new sensors, geomorphology, heritage & archaeology, spatial and
spectral sciences, there were double sessions each on InSAR and on planetary science.
Of the ten papers in the planetary science sessions, eight were dedicated to Mars and
the remaining two covered developments in Venus geoscience. The planetary papers
included discussions of:

● Hyperspectral characterisation of the Mars South Polar Residual Cap using the
CRISM on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
● Image-chain simulation and performance of ExoMars rover PanCam wide-angle
cameras
● Quantifying active surface processes on Mars with sub-pixel image co-registration
and correlation
● Anatomy of an ancient aeolian sandstone on Mars: the Stimson formation in Gale
crater
● Mars in 3D – 3D geological analysis and terrestrial validation of rover derived
stereo-imagery.
● Inter-comparison of methods for extracting subsurface layers from the SHAllow
RADar (SHARAD) on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Radargrams
over the Martian poles
● The status of planet-wide Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) DTM generation
using a fully automated multi-resolution DTM processing chain (CASP-GO)

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

5768 EDITORIAL

● Autocoregistration and orthorectification of CTX Images over the South Pole of

Mars.
● Radar data from Venus and Earth: Lessons in comparative planetology for EnVision
● Seeking out volcanism on Venus using IR and UV remote sensing

The two planetary sessions demonstrated the lively and growing UK interest in
planetary remote sensing. Details of the projects in hand can be found on the
websites of the Earth Science & Engineering Department of Imperial College
London, the EnVision Venus mission, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of
University College, Peter Grindrod, and the Department of Atmosopheric, Oceanic
and Planetary Physics, Oxford University.
Turning to the papers in this special issue there are four planetary papers, one on
lunar geomorpholology (Micheal and Vani 2018), two are concerned with the interesting
idea of setting up an Earth observing station on the surface of the Moon (Ye et al. 2018;
Duan, Huang, and Nie 2018) and the fourth paper is concerned with testing a robotic
vehicle for exploring other planets (Hobbs, Paull, and Clarke 2018). The general con-
ference-related papers dealing with marine applications of remote sensing are related to
near sea surface winds (Nekrasov et al. 2018), the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Varotsos,
Cracknell, and Efstathiou 2018) and the Larsen iceberg (Parmiggiani et al. 2018). As is
usual the majority of applications are land-based, covering the Kruger national park
(South Africa) (Munyati 2018), degraded land and dust erodibility (Kimura 2018), oil palm
mapping (Cheng et al. 2018), desert heat fluxes in Tibet (Ma, Wang, and Han 2018) and
methane emissions from wetlands (Bansal et al. 2018). Finally, there are two papers on
the atmosphere discussing the transport of carbon monoxide (Palve, Nemade, and
Ghude 2018) and weak backscattering signals from the atmosphere (Yegorov,
Potapova, and Sanotskaya 2018) and two on image analysis involving deep learning
(Zhang et al. 2018) and object based classification (Kavzoglu and Tonbul 2018).
We conclude by commenting that the importance of planetary science, in its broadest
sense, is growing fast, as is our need to really understand the Earth as a system. To fully
comprehend what makes Earth so special and what might happen to it in the future,
there are important lessons to be learned from looking at our Solar System neighbours,
especially if we are to understand the potential habitability of exoplanets. Our techno-
logical capabilities and expertise in Earth Observation will become ever more essential in
detecting, monitoring, measuring and interpreting processes on other planets. We
should all perhaps begin to think of ourselves as planetary scientists.

References
Bansal, S., J. K. Garg, C. S. Sharma, and D. Katyal. 2018. “Spatial Methane Emission Modelling
from Wetlands Using Geospatial Tools.” International Journal of Remote Sensing 39 (18):
5907–5933.
Cheng, Y., L. Yu, Y. Xu, X. Liu, H. Lu, A. P. Cracknell, K. Kanniah, and P. Gong. 2018. “Towards Global
Oil Palm Plantation Mapping Using Remote Sensing Data.” International Journal of Remote
Sensing 39 (18): 5891–5906.
Duan, W., S. Huang, and C. Nie. 2018. “Conceptual Design of a Moon-Based Earth Radiation
Observatory.” International Journal of Remote Sensing 39 (18): 5834–5849.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING 5769

Hobbs, S. W., D. J. Paull, and J. D. A. Clarke. 2018. “Testing Ground-Based Robotics as Remote-Sensing
Platforms for Structure from Motion – Implications for Planetary Science.” International Journal of
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Kavzoglu, T., and H. Tonbul. 2018. “An Experimental Comparison of Multi-Resolution
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Kimura, R. 2018. “Global Distribution of Degraded Land Area Based on Dust Erodibility Determined
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Ma, Y., Y. Wang, and C. Han. 2018. “Regionalization of Land Surface Heat Fluxes over the
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Philippa J. Mason and Arthur P Cracknell

apcracknell774787@yahoo.co.uk

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